The Ordinary Spectacle
I believe it is the artist’s challenge today to find beauty in a monstrous contemporary world. The ideal beautiful moment, for me, lives in a tension created by the unreconcilable aspects of our contemporary lives: the mundane tasks of our ordinary days are offset by virtual spectacles of intense pleasure and cataclysmic disaster. The action of these paintings is very much about “visual collision”. I think they speak to the way we experience the world today: constantly attempting to mediate our mundane existences with elaborate fantasies and extreme realities we are now more exposed to through technology. I wonder, how many of us yawn as we scroll between images of something (or someone) we desire and then past the most recent global disaster on our phone?
In my recent paintings I’ve been focused on exploring these ideas through narratives that depict people and their attempts to cope with beautiful yet threateningly abstract worlds. The landscapes inhabited are usually marked by colossal industrial structures which are set amidst explosions of colorful pigment blots that could suggest cumulus clouds, or explosions of airborne pollutants. Specifically, in this series I’ve incorporated a similar method to the Rorschach ink blot technique by folding the paper in half and pressing out blots of colored watercolor. When employed as elements of a landscape they read as reflective horizons and strangely symmetrical explosions.
I chose to explore this aesthetic for its reference to human psychology. The Rorschach method was developed as a type of psychological projective test, in which a subject was asked to interpret ambiguous ink blot forms into images that relate to their world. I like the idea that the characters of I’ve situated within these visual spaces are unable to figure out what is going on. I also like the idea that you as a viewer may engage in this psychological projection while looking at each painting.
